FYI: I sent an email a week or two ago to this
list which was somewhat wordy but did explain
that I need CDs specifically. But I got no
replies, probably because it was too wordy, so
I decided next time to send a much shorter,
more direct set of questions. Sorry for the
lack of context that time around!
For those curious about why I need CDs...
here's the wordy explanation.
My Debian machine is at home. It's not on the net,
so I needed to install from CD. I'm typing this
email from my work PC, which I can't mess with,
so I don't have Debian installed on it, so I can't
directly use aptitude to download packages.
I'm not a Debian guru; I just prefer the environ-
ment to Windows. In my spare time, I've written a
novel on it, using vi, LaTeX, ps2pdf (and python).
But much of my hardware didn't work, e.g. I wanted
to use the CD-drive to do scheduled backups, and
to be able to print, but I was using an ancient
version of Debian which didn't have all the
drivers or kernel modules. So I was stuck with
a dual-boot Windows solution, which was not
ideal. I'd rather not need to boot into Windows
ever! I decided to freshly install a more recent
version of Debian.
So, I downloaded ISO images, and just created
the first 2 Debian CDs. This proved to be more
than adequate to install a functional base
desktop system in under 2GB of disk, but a few
things were still missing. I didn't want to
create all of the other 12 CDs just to get a few
packages, so I thought I'd ask what CDs they
are on. Although I can use the web at work to
discover package dependencies, I didn't know
how to discover which CDs those packages are on.
In my case, the answer seems to be disk 3, and
the link http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/#search
lets you search for specific files. So I now have
a two stage process I can use to find all the
dependencies, then find the CDs they are on.
(Since my PC's apt database only knows about the
first two CDs which it has been exposed to, it
had no way of telling me to insert CD 3 when I
want LaTeX. Indeed, there was no way inside
aptitude to select LaTeX... it's not listed yet.)
I didn't know this online search facility existed,
so I think that will solve my problems.
Thank you to one and all, and I hope this has
satisfied any curiosity.
Loki